The Tide: Deadrise (3 page)

“I’m hungry,” Connor said to his mom.

Tammy Weaver tried to give him a reassuring smile. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”

“My tummy and my back hurt,” Connor said.

Lauren glared at Smith as Tammy tried to comfort Connor. The pulsating rhythm of the patients’ EKGs punctuated the uncomfortable silence.

“Look, gentlemen.” Lauren tried a different tack. “I don’t know what your brass thinks we did or didn’t do. But these people are innocent. They’re victims. We rescued them.”

She slowly stood, her expression wide-eyed and pleading. Smith seemed ready to cut her off again, but she continued before he could.

“You can keep the rest of my crew tied up if you want.” She looked at Divya, Peter, and Sean and offered an apologetic frown. “But let me help these people. Thomas needs fresh bandages and better sutures. If you’re trying to protect America, then protect what it stands for. If you still think he’s a criminal, put him up before a judge and jury or court-martial, if that’s what you prefer.” She knew full well courts of law might no longer exist, but she had to try to appeal to these men. “Let me at least keep them alive. Then you and your leaders can decide what to do with them. Don’t let death make the decision for you.”

Connor started to cry. She hated talking like this in front of the young boy, but now was no time to hold anything back. The guards remained steel-faced. Smith whispered to Turner and disappeared through the hatch and into the passageway. Lauren held her tongue, praying this was a good sign. Moments later the man came in with another guard, this one female. The guard stood near the hatch with the two men.

“She’ll take my spot,” Smith said to Turner and then faced Lauren. “Doctor, I will be on your back with a gun the entire time. I’ll fire if you so much as think about doing something funny. And after I shoot you, I’ll shoot the rest of your crew.”

Lauren nodded earnestly. “I understand. And I promise I won’t do anything so foolish.”

Smith yanked her wrists up violently. He cut the plastic ties away and then took a step back to put himself out of arm’s reach. Lauren moved with a deliberate slowness and held her hands up so he could clearly see what she was doing. She didn’t want to make a mistake that endangered her life or the others.

“I’m going to replenish their saline bags and nutrient drips, okay?” she asked.

Smith nodded but tightened his grip around his weapon. “Do what you need to do, but make it fast.”

The gun barrel followed her every move. Lauren walked between cabinets and drawers. After fixing their IV drips, she applied antibiotic gels and healing creams. She performed every task with the knowledge that her life might end at the subtle pull of a trigger any given second. She’d gone out in the field with Dom before, and she’d grown accustomed to working under pressure. But this was different.

Once she’d tended to the Weavers and Alex, she moved to Thomas. The man grimaced in pain. He’d never been given painkillers by the Coast Guard medics. They’d treated him with disdain and malignant neglect as if they’d already condemned him—judge, jury, and executioner.

“You holding up?” Lauren asked.

“No talking!” Smith barked.

Thomas shut his mouth. His face was ghost white, and sweat dripped across his wrinkled forehead, streaming from under his gray hair. He gave her a steely nod and closed his eyes as she peeled back the gauze to examine his wounds. There was an exit wound on his shoulder, signifying there was no bullet lodged in his flesh. It was bloody, but at least the risk of infection would be reduced.

Her investigation showed the bullet in his thigh was still embedded.

“We have to take it out,” Lauren said.

“We don’t have to do anything,” Smith replied, his eyes narrowed. “Patch it up, but no one’s getting surgery.”

Lauren furrowed her brow and pointed at the wound. “It’s shallow. I can remove it without anesthesia. It won’t be pretty, but I can do it.” She would have preferred Peter handle the procedure. The man was a talented surgeon. Surgery wasn’t her forte, but she knew pressing her luck was a bad idea. Anyway, she had something else in mind. “I just need a few supplies.”

She returned to the medicine cabinet. Her gun-toting shadow never strayed far as she snagged fresh sutures and surgical tools. She made a show of reaching for an empty spot in a cabinet.

“Damn,” she said, then rubbed her temple.

“What?” Smith asked.

“We’re out of clean gauze.”

“I find that hard to believe. A ship like this runs out of gauze? What are you playing at?”

“No, I mean, we just don’t have any
here.
” Lauren placed the tools in a metal tray and brought them to Thomas’s bedside. “We’ve got plenty of gauze stored in our supplies, but that’s in the cargo bay.”

The guard eyed the cabinet, then Lauren. She prepared several arguments in case he insisted he could go find the gauze for her.

“Then let’s go get it,” Smith said.

She stopped short of audibly sighing in relief. It wasn’t that she planned to do anything rash, but she wanted to see firsthand the current situation of the ship. Smith led her into the passageway and then prodded her through the corridor with the muzzle at her back. The hatch to the electronics workshop was open.

She stole a quick peek inside. Chao and Samantha were both tied to a post in the corner. Samantha had a black eye, and her knuckles were bleeding. Lauren stifled her grin. The comm specialist hadn’t given up without a fight. Samantha looked through the hatch and caught Lauren’s eye. Samantha gave her a furtive wink, which Lauren returned before being urged on by Smith.

These people might already think the
Huntress
was theirs and that the battle was won. But it wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. Just like Samantha, Lauren wouldn’t give up. They’d find a way to regain control of the
Huntress
. That shared wink had been enough to remind her that the whole crew would do anything in their power to get these invaders off their ship.

“Come on,” Smith said. “I want to get this over with.”

“Oh, of course,” Lauren said as she ducked through the hatch to the cargo bay. “It won’t take too long.”

And it won’t be too long before we take our ship back.

***

K
ara Holland watched Adam Galloway hunch over the comm equipment he’d taken from the
Huntress
. There was a myriad of small electronic bits and pieces she didn’t quite recognize laid out across the counter of the gift shop at Mt. Vernon. She wanted to learn everything she could about the equipment but didn’t want to bother the comm specialist now. He seemed to be hyper-focused on the task. While he worked, she could at least make herself useful. An open door in the gift shop led to the site’s restaurant.

There, red-and-white wallpaper lined the gloomy room. Sunlight filtered in between the heavy canvas curtains and illuminated dust motes floating in the air.

“Looking for some grub?” Navid Ghasemi asked, his shirt pulled over his nose. He and Adam had helped them escape from the
Huntress
when it was taken. Now all they had to do was wait for her dad’s team to arrive. But first, they needed to eat.

Kara pinched her nostrils closed. “Smells awful.”

“No kidding.”

Kara’s little sister, Sadie, came out from the kitchen holding a plastic bag filled with brown liquid and the remains of what used to be some kind of fruit or vegetable. Maggie followed, tail wagging and tongue lolling as if the odor was the best thing she’d ever experienced.

“What do you think this is?” Sadie asked. “Isn’t it gross?”

“Yeah, so why are you carrying it?”

“Looking for the good food. Navid said we should get all the rotten stuff and throw it away.”

“Not just throw it away, but bury it,” Navid added. “You can practically smell this restaurant from all over the estate.”

“Doesn’t sound like a terrible idea,” Kara said. “I’ll help.”

She regretted those words as she helped Navid and Sadie fill trash bags full of meat and fruits with green and black stuff growing all over them. A dense fog of buzzing flies droned around the shelves and refrigerators, and squirming white maggots poked out of the slabs of uncooked poultry and beef. She swore one of the steaks almost ran away when she reached for it.

“Maggie, get out of there!” Sadie yelled. The dog backed from a drawer filled with mold-covered bread.

“Got to dig past the dirt to get to the diamonds,” Navid quipped.

He seemed almost happy. But he’d been through far too much to really be in such a good mood, Kara thought. They all had. Maybe this mindless task was just enough to keep Navid from dwelling on the girlfriend he’d lost. She’d apparently turned into a Skull before his eyes, and he’d been forced to kill her with his own hands.

Kara shuddered, her mind wheeling back to the transformation she’d seen in her mother. She wondered what kind of skeletal monstrosity her mother had become, locked in their basement back in Frederick. If only someone had offered her mother the mercy Navid offered his girlfriend by ending her suffering before she’d become a Skull.

“You good?” Navid asked, lugging another trash bag outside.

Kara walked alongside him with her own bag, focusing on the waves of overgrown grass flowing in the wind over the estate. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

They set the bags in a dumpster behind the restaurant.

“Silly to put it in here, huh?” Kara said.

“I know. No one’s coming to take our garbage anytime soon. But it can serve as a staging area until we figure out what to do with it.”

Kara used the back of her hand to wipe the sweat off her forehead. The sun glared overhead, but a crisp autumnal breeze rustled the leafless branches. She could feel goose bumps prickle across her skin despite the sweatshirt she wore emblazoned with George Washington’s portrait. Navid closed his eyes and soaked in the sunlight and fresh air for a moment. He wore a matching sweatshirt taken from the gift shop. They might not have as much food as they’d hoped for, but clean clothes were plentiful if not fashionable. He leaned against the brick wall of the restaurant.

“I’ve missed this,” he said.

Kara raised an eyebrow. She was itching to get back to work, but she realized she’d never really sat down and talked to Navid about anything other than their immediate survival or the quest for a vaccine for the Oni Agent. “You miss what?”

“The quiet.” He opened his brown eyes again and stared earnestly, almost unnervingly, into hers. “Boston was always full of noise.”

Kara imagined Navid stranded in the Boston hospital. She must’ve let her sympathy play across her face because he waved his hands in a supplicating gesture.

“I’m not talking about after the Oni Agent,” he said. “I mean, it was noisy then. The screams, the howling. The claws on concrete.” He shivered, and Kara could tell it wasn’t from the breeze. “Abby and I lived in the city for our entire undergraduate and graduate school careers.”

“Your girlfriend, right?” Kara asked.

Navid nodded.

Kara gave him a look that she hoped conveyed her sympathy for him.

“I never took as much time off with her as I should have,” he said, nodding. “I should’ve been outside that damned lab more. We could’ve gone hiking. Or maybe camping for the weekend. Just get away from the city.”

Kara smiled. “I know what you mean. Some of my best memories are of hunting trips with my dad.”

Navid looked almost shocked. “You hunt?” Then he allowed himself a laugh. “Guess that’s why you seem so at home around guns. I hadn’t ever touched a gun before Adam took us off the
Huntress
.”

“Yeah,” Kara said. She thought about her father, who had hidden a secret life as a freelance CIA contractor from them. She thought about her mother, trapped in the basement of their former home, turned into a mindless killing machine by the Oni Agent. She thought about everything that had changed and been taken from her and never would be the same again. But at least she still had her sister.

Her heart skipped a beat. Sadie had been right behind them with a trash bag, so where was she? Kara lunged into the restaurant with Navid at her heels.

“Sadie? You lounging on the job?”

There was no answer. Maggie didn’t bark, either, and the golden retriever hardly ever left the younger girl’s side.

“Sadie?”

Still no response.

“She’s probably with Adam,” Navid said. He ducked into the gift shop. “You seen Sadie?”

Adam looked up from the radio parts. “No.” He stood straighter, and his hand shot to his holster. “Is she missing?”

“I don’t know,” Kara said. She rushed back to the restaurant. Navid and Adam followed. Then she spotted the open front door. It led to a sidewalk and an empty parking lot. Sadie was nowhere in sight. “Damn it!”

“It’s okay,” Adam said. “Probably no reason to get worried. I’ll check out the woods along the parking lot. Why don’t you two follow the trail to the gardens? Maybe she just went to walk Maggie.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Kara said doubtfully.

“It’s getting dark. Grab a couple of flashlights, okay?” Adam said, heading out the door.

“Got it,” Navid replied.

Kara picked up a flashlight and then began jogging down the path. Navid ran beside her, not saying a word. They rounded the building and made their way past lines of bushes and wooden fences. Withered sunflowers whipped in the wind. Little placards announced the various plants they passed. Some had survived a world without attentive gardeners; some had not.

“Sadie?” Kara called. She didn’t want to attract any Skulls that might be lingering in the woods at the edges of the massive estate, but she couldn’t help the urgency in her voice.

“We’ll find her,” Navid said. His reassuring smile looked forced.

The masquerade didn’t convince Kara. She’d already abandoned her mother to her fate as a Skull. Navid’s girlfriend had shared that same horrible damnation. There was no way she’d let Sadie turn into one.

“Sadie! This isn’t funny! Where are you?”

She finally heard Sadie’s voice. But it wasn’t an apologetic reply. It was a bloodcurdling scream.